A few weeks ago, I visited a friend at her family’s house in the Rockaways. The house was painted in the colors of the Sabrett hot dog brand — yellow and blue — and the living room featured a matching bench with a Sabrett umbrella sprouting from the center of the table like a parasitic growth. Children rode their bikes down the street. Mothers walked their little white dogs in synchronized packs. There were about 10 or 11 of us, and we spent the day at the beach reading, drinking, eating.
That evening, we gathered on the backyard patio while mosquitoes tore our bare legs to shreds. All conversations eventually funnel into sex or violence or both. Over vegetarian pizzas, we discussed our porn preferences.
“So, what do you search?” J asked, chin in palm, voice lewd and delighted. “One of our friends from college, who was really into rock climbing, used to search for rock climbing porn. Or naked ladies rock climbing.”
“Do you search for yourself? Or for what you want to see?” I asked. My boyfriend slapped a mosquito dead against his leg.
“What do you mean?”
“I search ‘Asian,’ and then a bunch of modifiers. ‘Asian rough.’ ‘Asian big boobs.’ ‘Asian rough big boobs.’ ‘Asian flat butt skinny.’”
“No, I look for what I want to see.”
Around the table, heads nodded. They searched for who they wanted to have sex with — not who they were.
Afterward, I kept wondering, was my self-image so diminished I could only imagine being acted upon? Or was I so narcissistic I had to self-insert to get off? I’ve always described my life as a series of things that happened to me. I’ve often let inertia carry me instead of steering the wheel.
When I was a kid, I once asked my high-achieving, sports-obsessed father if he knew my favorite color. He told me he didn’t need to. “Successful people make choices,” he said. “They shape their lives. They don’t just let things happen.”
Sitting on that patio, mosquito-bitten and silent, I knew I wasn’t a successful person. Maybe I never would be.
E. Y. Zhao’s Underspin begins at the end, the funeral of Ryan Lo, a table tennis prodigy whose death feels both inevitable and unreal. From there, the book unfolds in shifting points of view — friends, rivals, exes, coaches — each trying to make sense of the golden boy who killed himself. Ryan is described with reverence. Beautiful, disciplined, gifted. A prodigy shimmering with promise and expectation. Coaches adore him. Mothers whisper his name.
But he never speaks for himself.
Ryan’s is the only voice missing from the chorus. We see him through others — his ex-girlfriend Annabel, who hasn’t spoken to him in years, a German doctor assessing him on the international circuit, his abusive coach Kristian, who pushed him past the brink. The exact nature of the abuse is murky — emotional, perhaps sexual, but never confirmed — but like many stories of winners, the facts are buried beneath image and myth. What remains are fragments. Praise, pressure, silence.
Kristian’s POV chapter, the first story in the second part of the novel, gives us only as much as the coach is willing to admit to himself: “I want to give him a massage. Instead — though if I do feel a thrill when my fingers work through a neglected muscle a round of fat untouched by sun, a thrill I cannot compare to what others feel because, how can you?” The sentences stutter into evasion. No one can say what really happened. But everyone can feel its aftermath.
Ryan remains on the periphery until the epilogue. And even then, we only see him through the guards of an art museum.
We celebrate champions. But the pain that forges them is often too ugly to look at directly.
What’s striking, too, is that Zhao’s champion is an Asian American man, a figure who has rarely occupied the center of contemporary literary fiction, much less in the high-stakes, hypermasculine space of competitive sports. In much of American media, Asian American men are spectators, sidekicks, comic relief; when they do play, their victories are often framed as novelty or anomaly. Underspin refuses that framing. Ryan Lo is neither token nor stereotype. He’s allowed to be prodigiously gifted and deeply flawed, lionized and broken, magnetic and unknowable. Zhao doesn’t write him as a model minority or as a convenient counterpoint to whiteness; she writes him as a person whose life is both illuminated and consumed by his sport.
The sports novel has been evolving toward this kind of oblique, fractured storytelling for decades. Early entries in the genre — Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly, John Tunis’ mid-century baseball tales — placed the game itself at the center, the season serving as the novel’s structural spine. Victory or defeat provided the emotional payoff. By the late 20th century, writers like Don DeLillo in End Zone and David Foster Wallace with Infinite Jest shifted the focus from the score to the psychic, linguistic, and cultural architecture surrounding the game.
Wallace’s tennis sections in Infinite Jest, set in the cloistered, hyper-disciplined world of the Enfield Tennis Academy, were perhaps the first in American fiction to treat competitive sport as both philosophical inquiry and language experiment. Matches are rendered with obsessive technical detail, but the real matches take place in the mind: between self-consciousness and muscle memory, ambition and dread. Perfection is never a finish line, only a moving target, and the novel’s digressive, fractured form mirrors the psychology of the player who can never quite arrive.
Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding brings that same psychological granularity to baseball. The novel opens with a throw so pure it alters the fate of everyone who sees it, then follows its arc downward as the player’s confidence collapses. Baseball here is inseparable from the love affairs, intellectual ambitions, and private shame of its characters; the diamond is a stage for both grace and paralysis. Harbach grafts the sports novel to the campus novel, giving it room for comedy, romance, and failure that unfold far beyond the foul lines.
Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions takes the opposite approach. Dispensing almost entirely with conventional plot, Chen’s narrator drifts through philosophy, sports history, and personal loss, using the idea of “exertion” as both subject and method. Instead of the arc of triumph and defeat, there are fragments, unsuccessful training regimens, obscure Olympic trivia, notes on Zhuangzi, arranged like an unfinishable notebook. The refusal of narrative closure becomes its own statement. The sports narrative, like sport itself, can be an endless loop rather than a path toward redemption.
I played competitive ping-pong as a kid. Every weekend, my parents drove me from New Jersey to Flushing to train at Coach Liu’s NYTTC near Main Street. I reached a career high of No. 10 in the U.S. for Girls 16 and Under — close, but not close enough to matter. Not enough to be exceptional. Not enough to be undeniable. Even practicing hours every day wasn’t enough to hone me into a star.
I knew the real stars. Their footwork. Their JOOLA sponsorships. Their Chinese summer training camps. I wasn’t one of them.
Underspin captures the stress and cruelty of that world with painful accuracy. In one scene, a lower-ranked player named Ellen joins a group of elite high school players for a tournament. They mock her 1700 rating, telling her she’s only there because someone better dropped out. It’s brutal. It’s familiar.
Reading, I remembered my own humiliation. Knowing my forehand wasn’t fast enough, my shots not clean enough, my paddle not expensive enough. I’d never train in China. I’d never go pro. I cried in the car after bad matches. I prayed for my dad not to speak.
Ryan Lo rarely loses a match. But his loss is subtler, deeper — the inability to escape the image constructed around him. The slow erosion of self under the weight of expectation. In one of the few moments we hear his voice, Ryan says, “Here’s what my coach told me . . . . Imagine aiming the ball like a lightning bolt. Imagine destroying them all.”
The novel moves not only toward answers, but also questions. What becomes of the people trained to win, once they stop winning? What becomes of the kids we raise to win, once they begin to lose? What becomes of people who settle into normalcy, who stop chasing dreams?
The night I quit table tennis wasn’t, like so many other nights, an evening of yelling between my parents. My mother sat me down on the plush living room couch and asked whether I wanted to continue.
I didn’t. I gave up. After reaching a career high ranking of around 1600, I no longer wanted to play. The incessant pressure. The endless weekends spent in gyms that smelled of rubber mats and liniment. The constant calculation — whether to fight for every point or conserve energy for the next match. The competing pull of my growing tennis career. The knowledge that no matter how much I trained, there would always be someone younger, faster, already overseas sharpening their skills against the best in the world.
My mother didn’t argue. She simply nodded and asked me to tell my father. For weeks, he avoided mentioning the sport entirely, as if by not speaking its name we could undo my choice.
Underspin clarified something I hadn’t realized needed naming. It resurrected the idols of my ping-pong childhood and showed me what might’ve become of them. It reminded me of my father’s relentless expectations and my quiet exit from the sport. It made me weep — for how we pressure children, how we scrutinize them, how we build them into myths and forget they’re still alive underneath.
My father and I have a wonderful relationship today. I love him very much. He loves me very much. We’ve both forgiven each other for the mistakes we made. Still, sometimes I wonder whether he sees my quitting as a failure of will, or whether he understands it as something closer to mercy.
I’ve made peace, as best I can, with my own mediocrity. I never became a ping-pong champion. I never sold my novel. I never started my own company.
After returning from the Rockaways with my boyfriend, we picked up a 20-piece McNugget and small fries from McDonald’s. It was almost midnight. We ate naked on the floor, plates balanced on our chests, Jeopardy! on full blast, the window open.
Ken Jennings asked, “This Greek figure was punished for his hubris by being chained to a rock where an eagle ate his liver daily.”
“Prometheus!” I shouted, mouth full of McNugget.
In the great sports novel, the game is rarely just a game. It is a mirror for the self, a stage for obsession, a pressure chamber for identity. From the disciplined collapse of Harbach’s The Art of Fielding to the philosophical drift of Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions and the fractal intensity of Wallace’s tennis in Infinite Jest, the most enduring works in the genre use sport not to celebrate victory but to illuminate the private costs of ambition. Underspin belongs in that company. It understands that the most important matches take place far from the scoreboard, in the spaces where doubt accumulates and the body becomes a record of what it has endured.
But unlike Infinite Jest, where Hal Incandenza finally faces his father in a strange, ghostly match, or The Art of Fielding, where Henry Skrimshander claws back a form of grace in the season’s last game, Underspin offers no such redemption. There is no culminating rally, no elegant return to form. Ryan Lo is not saved by his sport; the sport is simply where his story happened. In this way, Zhao’s novel aligns more with So Many Olympic Exertions, where exertion is endless and unredeemed and the act of striving is its own closed circuit. The absence of a restorative final match makes Underspin not an anti-sports novel, but a clear-eyed one. It knows that for many athletes, the ending is neither victory nor even defeat — it is simply the moment the game stops being played.
I wonder now how many times I’ve given up. If I have that ineffable quality in me to win, win, win. I see it in other people. My friends who won Math Olympiad competitions in high school. My old tennis partners who played at Division 1 colleges. My boyfriend who won’t stop working on the weekends and plans on running his first marathon soon. But it all probably doesn’t matter. For most of us, history has no place to put our names.
By the time readers start to spot Ryan’s downfall, all the other characters are already trying to forget him: “She only googled Ryan’s name once more. She read a blog post from the new club where he was coaching, with his friend Denny in Indiana, but even the shape of his name pained her, and she never looked him up again.”
In America, losing is mired in shame. In Asia, not trying is the greater shame. For Chinese Americans, this feels like a natural dichotomy where winning and not losing become two separate artifacts of the sport. For Chinese American men in particular, so often denied the cultural scripts of athletic dominance, these stakes can feel doubled. Winning becomes not only a personal achievement but proof against erasure, a way of entering a record that has historically left you out.
Underspin lives in that space between. It is not just about the one who fell, but about the rest of us, too: the ones who didn’t see it coming, the ones still chasing the finish line, the ones who don’t yet realize that even now, long after the trophies have been handed out, we might still be in the game.
Olivia Cheng is a Zell fellow at the University of Michigan. Her fiction can be found in The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Guernica, and more.
Another sports novel worth reading is Bernard Malamud's "The Natural," baseball (1952). A gifted Jewish young man drawn into the game, his rise and fall. Great reading.
Hold onto that novel! It will get bought and published one day.